High Priestess Arlokk
High Priestess Arlokk is spawned by hitting the gong in her room. She spawns near the entrance to the room in priest form using Shadow Word: Pain and standard melee attack. Immediately upon engaging her, multiple level 60 (non-elite) panthers spawn from cages on each side of the room, about one every 5 seconds. She will immediately 'mark' somone that the panthers will all attack. After one minute she stealths. She does not attack while stealthed. The panthers will continue to spawn while she is stealthed. Take advantage of this time to destroy as many panthers as possible. She will return to battle roughly 30 seconds later, opening up with 2 Whirlwind attacks. She will then disappear again after one minute and the cycle continues until she is killed. Note that it is important to destroy the panthers as fast as possible, as the spawn rate seems to increase as the fight progresses. FIghting the Priestess herself is relatively straightforward, just hit her hard with DPS until she stealths, then kill panthers until she returns. She will spawn randomly around the room each time she returns from stealth. The most important part of this fight is to keep on top of the panther situation with AOE, etc. Otherwise, it can get out of control quite quickly and the raid will wipe. “Cage Team�? Strategy Since the AOE-bombing tactics discussed above tends to be a bit tricky in terms of mana-use and respawning panthers (especially for groups that are not well equipped) here is an alternative strategy for dealing with the spawning panther adds: The trick that worked well for us was to dispatch a tank with a shaman healer in front of each of the two panther cages. Standing directly at the exit of the two cages, the tanks should be able to bind most of the spawning panthers to themselves, thus preventing the panthers from leaving the cage and going for the person with the mark. Both shaman healers stand directly behind their tank to keep them alive and support them with totems. Chances are quite high that the shaman healers will take a bit of a beating from the panthers if the battle lasts to long, since the continual healing will start drawing large amounts of aggro away from the cage tank. However this will only become a problem if you don't manage to kill High Priestess Arlokk fast enough (before she disappears for the third or fourth time) since the cage shamans will survive quite a while even with as many as 8-10 panthers attacking them. As long as no other raid members (besides the “cage team�?) heal or otherwise help the two cage tanks then they should be able to hold the aggro of most of the panthers during the entire encounter. Note: As long as the panthers remain within the cages, they will completely ignore the person with the "mark". If healing the cage tanks should become a problem, then try dispatching a further healer (a druid if possible) to stand at the gong and random heal both the two cage tanks and the shamans with low-threat HoT's. But be warned, there are some problems with this tactic: The main reason for failure with this technique will most likely be unlucky respawns of Arlokk between the two phases. In most cases Arlokk will reappear somewhere close to one of the two cages (often even in one of the cages) - the worst thing that can happen to you at this point is a boss respawn right beside one of the cage healers - even a shaman with his shield and mail will be dead within seconds if the MT is not ready to taunt and pull the boss out of the cage and back to the tank spot. However with a pair of sturdy def-tanks in the cages you should also be able to tank the panthers without getting much healing so even if one of your cage healers goes OOM or dies you may well still be able to kill the boss and all the panthers before the cage tank goes down. The extra cage healer standing at the gong can be a true lifesaver in these situations. To further reduce the chance of “accidents�? when the boss reappears it may be a good idea to have the entire raid stand right up against the wall opposite of the gong as soon as Arlokk disappears. Only the MT and the cage team remain on their positions as long as the boss is in stealth mode. This way it should be far easier for the MT to discover and taunt the boss as soon as she reappears and thus avoid the cage team from taking any serious damage. Note: A great help in tanking the panthers is to equip your entire cage team (all raid members involved with the panthers – in other words the cage tanks and shamans + druid) with a Green Whelp Armor. This armor is very easy to make and has the passive effect of casting a 30 second sleeping spell on any melee attacker (5% chance). Due to the vast number of panthers you’ll be dealing with and the high attack speed, this armor will effectively put about 15-25% of the panthers to sleep. This fact alone should greatly increase your chances of survival as the cage healers will not go OOM so easily. For a non-MC/BWL equipped raid this armor can truly be worth its weight in gold during the first few tries.